Image: Airspeeder
By Lauren Rouse
We are officially living in the future because the world’s first flying race car has just taken off.
Airspeeder announced that its remotely piloted Alauda Mk3 models have taken their first successful flight. The eVTOLs are being tested in anticipation of electric flying car races that will be held later in the year.
Continue reading… “The World’s First Flying Race Car Has Taken Off”Plans to roll 1,000 of ’em off the production line in three years
Chinese tech giant Baidu and state-owned BAIC Group’s ARCFOX Brand have teamed to build 1000 autonomous electric vehicles (EVs) for use as taxis over the next three years — and claim they’ve cut manufacturing costs to just $75,000 apiece.
The announcement claims the reasonable price is due to maturation in technology and mass production capabilities and makes the vehicle, called the Apollo Moon, only one third of the cost of average L4 autonomous vehicles.
Apollo Moon has a projected operating cycle of over five years and is built on the fully electric midsize crossover SUV, Arcfox α-T. As for the tech, it uses the ANP-Robotaxi navigation platform, which is currently in pilot. Baidu claims the architecture can “reduce the weight of autonomous vehicle kits while sharing intelligent driving vehicle data to create a closed-loop information ecosystem.”
Continue reading… “Chinese web giant Baidu unveils Level 4 robo-taxi that costs $75k to make”The Starship SN10, on ascent.
By Brad Bergan
Appearances can be deceiving.
In a bizarre turn of events, SpaceX just rolled its newest Starship, SN16, from its Boca Chica, Texas factory directly to the nearby “rocket garden,” where the private aerospace firm retires its Mars-vehicle prototypes. But appearances can deceive: Soon after industry experts made their peace with SN16, CEO Elon Musk tweeted that no, this was not the case, at all.
Continue reading… “Elon Musk Says SpaceX’s Starship SN16 Might Jump to Hypersonic Flight”The promise of a leagues-more-affordable technology that anyone can wear and walk around with is, well, mind-bending.
This helmet measures changes in blood oxygenation levels.
Over the next few weeks, a company called Kernel will begin sending dozens of customers across the U.S. a $50,000 helmet that can, crudely speaking, read their mind. Weighing a couple of pounds each, the helmets contain nests of sensors and other electronics that measure and analyze a brain’s electrical impulses and blood flow at the speed of thought, providing a window into how the organ responds to the world. The basic technology has been around for years, but it’s usually found in room-size machines that can cost millions of dollars and require patients to sit still in a clinical setting.
The promise of a leagues-more-affordable technology that anyone can wear and walk around with is, well, mind-bending. Excited researchers anticipate using the helmets to gain insight into brain aging, mental disorders, concussions, strokes, and the mechanics behind previously metaphysical experiences such as meditation and psychedelic trips. “To make progress on all the fronts that we need to as a society, we have to bring the brain online,” says Bryan Johnson, who’s spent more than five years and raised about $110 million-half of it his own money-to develop the helmets.
Continue reading… “A $50,000 Helmet Can Read User’s Mind. And It’s Ready”Japan Supersonic Research wants to be in the air by 2030
Japan has a assembled a supergroup of aviation, industrial, and space organisations to build a supersonic passenger jet.
The new organisation, Japan Supersonic Research (JSR), quietly signed itself into existence on March 31st. Yesterday, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that it is a member, alongside Japan Aircraft Development Association, Japan Aerospace Exploration Association, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries), IHI Corporation, and Subaru.
Japan’s aerospace industry currently focuses on manufacturing components for aircrafts and engines, including wings and fuselages. Mitsubishi recently hangared plans to build its own mid-size passenger jet. Another more successful exception is Subaru’s joint manufacturing deal for the Bell 412 helicopter, sold locally in modified versions called the Subaru Bell 412EPX and XUH-2.
JSR’s vision is to engage in international joint development of supersonic aircraft by 2030.
Continue reading… “Japan assembles superteam of aircraft component manufacturers to build supersonic passenger plane”Spacebok during early tests ESA
By Chris Young
Though wheeled robots are more stable, legged robots can reach areas that a rolling rover couldn’t.
Every roving robot that has landed on Mars up to the latest Perseverance rover, which touched down in February, has one thing in common — every single one of them has wheels.
SpaceBok, built by a team of scientists from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, is a small quadrupedal robot named after the springbok antelope, a report from Wired explains.
The robot was originally designed to leap and bound on the surface of the Moon in the same way astronauts did during the Apollo landings — Springboks are also known to “pronk” or leap into the air, though the exact reason is not known.
The team tested different gaits, as well as small hoof-like feet and flat, round feet with cleats for more stability.
As much of the research on Mars revolves around craters — Mars Perseverance landed on the Jezero crater due to the belief that it may have once been a habitable river valley — the team behind SpaceBok trained their robot on a large tilted sandbox full of rocks to simulate Mars.
Continue reading… “Meet SpaceBok: The First Four-Legged Robot Set for Mars”An engineer demonstrates a car phone five months before the historic first call on a competing company’s commercial mobile telephone service in 1946.
By Daniel Bliss, Arizona State University
I have a cellphone built into my watch. People now take this type of technology for granted, but not so long ago it was firmly in the realm of science fiction. The transition from fantasy to reality was far from the flip of a switch. The amount of time, money, talent and effort required to put a telephone on my wrist spanned far beyond any one product development cycle.
The people who crossed a wristwatch with a cellphone worked hard for several years to make it happen, but technology development really occurs on a timescale of decades. While the last steps of technological development capture headlines, it takes thousands of scientists and engineers working for decades on myriad technologies to get to the point where blockbuster products begin to capture the public’s imagination.
The first mobile phone service, for 80-pound telephones installed in cars, was demonstrated on June 17, 1946, 75 years ago. The service was only available in major cities and highway corridors and was aimed at companies rather than individuals. The equipment filled much of a car’s trunk, and subscribers made calls by picking up the handset and speaking to a switchboard operator. By 1948, the service had 5,000 customers.
Continue reading… “The first mobile phone call was 75 years ago – what it takes for technologies to go from breakthrough to big time”By Sage Lazzaro
It looks like no-code and low-code toolsare here to stay. Today, Gartner released new predictions about technology products and services, specifically who will build them and the impact of AI and the pandemic. The research firm found that by 2024, 80% of tech products and services will be built by people who are not technology professionals. Gartner also expects to see more high-profile announcements of technology launches from nontech companies over the next year.
“The barrier to become a technology producer is falling due to low-code and no-code development tools,” Gartner VP Rajesh Kandaswamy told VentureBeat. When asked what kinds of tech products and services these findings apply to, he said “all of them.” Overall, Kandaswamy sees enterprises increasingly treating digital business as a team sport, rather than the sole domain of the IT department.
For this research, Gartner defined technology professionals as those whose primary job function is to help build technology products and services, using specific skills like software development testing and infrastructure management. This includes IT professionals and workers with specialized expertise such as CRM, AI, blockchain, and DevOps.
But instead of tech professionals driving what’s next, Gartner predicts a democratization of technology development that includes citizen developers, data scientists, and “business technologists,” a term that encompasses a wide range of employees who modify, customize, or configure their own analytics, process automation, or solutions as part of their day-to-day work. Aside from non-IT humans, AI systems that generate software will also play a significant role, according to Gartner.
Continue reading… “80% of tech could be built outside IT by 2024, thanks to low-code tools”Companies that made it through the pandemic in one piece now have a major new problem: more than a quarter of their employees may leave.
What’s happening: Workers have had more than a year to reconsider work-life balance or career paths, and as the world opens back up, many of them will give their two weeks’ notice and make those changes they’ve been dreaming about.
“The great resignation” is what economists are dubbing it.
DELIVERY OF COVID-19 VACCINES BY DRONES IS EXPECTED TO BEGIN, TRANSPORTING 10,000 VIALS FROM A CENTRAL LOCATION TO PRIMARY HEALTH CENTRES NEARBY
A global drone services provider ANRA Technologies will hold experimental deliveries of medicines in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar and with Swiggy for food deliveries.
India will carry out the first long-range drone flights for delivery of medicines and food in parts of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Punjab.
The experimental deliveries will be conducted using long-range drones that can fly upto 20 kilometers, a report in The Economic Times said. This will mark the first time for use of such drones as India permits only drone flights within visual line of sight or 450 metres from the operator.
A global drone services provider ANRA Technologies will hold experimental deliveries of medicines in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar and with Swiggy for food deliveries, the report added.
Continue reading… “India to start drone trials for delivery of food, medicines, vaccines: Check details”Woodsat will take plywood to new heights in orbit later this year after acing a stratospheric test flight.
The WISA Woodsat team is working with ESA on testing and sensors for the world’s first wooden satellite.Arctic Astronautics
Toothpicks. Tables. Crates. Spoons. Satellites? An ambitious project will send a tiny wooden satellite into orbit later this year to see if it can stand up to the brutal conditions of space. It’s already survived a test run into the stratosphere.
The WISA Woodsat is a 4-inch (10-centimeter) square satellite that’s scheduled for a fall launch on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket in New Zealand. Getting to orbit is only part of the adventure. Once it’s there, the team will monitor the little cube to see how its plywood build stands up to cold, heat, radiation and the vacuum of space.
Woodsat is the brainchild of Jari Makinen, co-founder of CubeSat replica kit company Arctic Astronautics. The European Space Agency, or ESA, is providing a suite of sensors to track the satellite’s performance and will also help with pre-flight testing.
Continue reading… “World’s first wooden satellite aims to prove plywood can survive space”By Andy Meek
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un can angrily denounce K-pop as a “vicious cancer” all he wants. It’s not just that pop music has become one of the most beloved exports from his neighbor to the south, but the same holds true for pretty much the entirety of South Korean popular culture — everything from movies to music and TV shows, which have combined to form a staggeringly massive entertainment industry juggernaut, with few if any equals.
Netflix, for example, recognizes this and is currently pouring millions of dollars into funding new original Korean dramas and movies, like the newly released emotional masterpiece Move to Heaven, about a “trauma cleaner” and his uncle who pack up the belongings of people who’ve died and help their families to move on. All told, Netflix reportedly plans to spend half a billion dollars in 2021 on South Korean content, which also coincides with a moment that finds South Korean pop groups (like Blackpink and BTS) being among the biggest in the world. Those two groups, in particular, have millions of global fans and incomprehensibly massive audiences across social media — which might explain why the four members of Blackpink, in particular, got their own documentary treatment on Netflix, via their movie Light Up The Sky. Meanwhile, technology is also helping point toward a futuristic and potentially even more lucrative new chapter for Korean pop music. Case in point is the new K-pop group called Eternity, which recently made its debut via the song I’m Real, although this 11-member girl group is much different from anything else in the K-pop universe right now.
That’s because, with apologies to the message conveyed by Eternity’s debut song, the members are, in fact, not real. This new K-pop group, which is the product of AI graphics company Pulse 9, was created using deepfake technology to simulate hyper-realistic images of faux K-pop stars in the vein of some of the genre’s biggest female acts, a la Blackpink, Red Velvet, and Itzy.
“Unlike human singers,” Pulse 9 CEO Park Ji-eun told the South China Morning Post, “AI members can freely express themselves and weigh in on diverse social issues because they are less vulnerable to malicious comments and criticisms. As a creator, I can also add more fantastical and (impactful) elements to them, making them more distinguishable from existing K-pop acts.”
Continue reading… “Watch: This new K-pop group was created with AI and deepfake technology”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.
